Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

iRobot and Neato, please STOP making your vacs more and more complicated without first fixing at least two of the three largest issues for robot vacs. Hey, it's been nearly 20 years, you should have fixed the basics by now. Instead, you keep upping the anti to make vacs uber complex and, in the process, uber unreliable and unpredictable. The thee primary and inherent problems with robot vacs are: 1. Battery life 2. They get stuck (hence loosing any benefit of automation) 3. They track up the carpet to make it look worse after it is vacuumed then before As for item #1, I give these companies a pass because the product would be super expensive if it used a long-life battery with a small enough package to fit in the vaccuum. As a user of the first Roomba and then the 900 series. I can state that iRobot fixed item #3 right out of the gate. The older robots left a beautiful swirly seashell pattern and their newer ones leave nice straight rows. Neato, on the other hand, fixed item #2 with their recent design of no-go lines, but does super poorly on item #3 in that they totally butcher carpets and jump rooms before the room is complete. They eventually return to the room to complete it, but if the battery dies, you have a half vacuumed room. What is shameful is that after nearly 20-years, there is still not a single robot vac that fixes both items 2 and 3. As for the i7, it gets stuck, just like the 980 did. In fact, my older 900 (rest in peace) didn't get stuck where the 980 did. So much for all those advanced sensors. So, what are you getting for the $1,200 price tag? You're getting a 980 with reduced battery life that empies it's own bin.Big deal. Folks, I'm a capitalist at heart, but if the two minutes it takes to empty a bin is worth $1,200 to you, then I agree with Bernie Sanders in that people have way too much money to burn. Yeah, the vac also maps the room, but without no-go lines, the mapping is simply a surperfluous gimmick. The iRobot folks will say that the mapping is so you can program the vac to do diffent rooms on a schedule. This is not so much a benefit as it is a meg-shift fix to compensate for the poor battery life. It wouldn't have taken much to incorpoirate no-go lines in the app and make this vac a winner by being the first robot vac in 20-years to finally fix two of the most basic failings. But iRobot is the king of releasing products that are not ready for prime-time by giving them expensive bells and whistles. Of course they will say, "Hey, you can us the virtual wall units." Problem there is I would have to babysit and follow the damn thing around with the wall unit every time it vacuumed. Where then is the beneift of having an automated robot? For that matter, where then is the automation at all? It's easier, and a lot less costly, just to go around with my canister vac. "Oh, but you can set up multiple virtual wall units," they will reply. Yeah, you can do that if you want to spend another $1,000 on virtual wall units and litter up your carpets by having them permanantly placed everywhere that these smart-idiot vacuums would get stuck. Hey, the vac may be a solution to some, but I find it an expensive toy that requires a babysitter.